That might not be fair, Verhoeven has proven to have a better hand with thoughtful material. (As I say that, there really is a serious class of Showgirls defenders. Having not seen the film yet, I'll give them the doubt benefit.)

Not just any director can do this, otherwise Dawn of the Dead '04 would have been brilliant instead of hollow and pointless.

If there is one sort of movie that really needs to grow up, it's the mainstream action film. Sure, there are plenty of smart action films but I think Die Hard and Schwarzenegger have had a bad hand in really PG'ing the genre. Then Will Smith, Bay and Emmerich, Twister, and the superhero movies- now everything has to be PG-something. Everything has to be in the same basic group, superhero movies sure you expect to be PG but Robocop- wow... No. If not this remake, when are we going to get an action-adventure movie based on some sort of mainstream property that actually does get grown up? That treats violence in the Verhoeven vein?

People are too obsessed with ratings. Ratings have nothing to do with how good a film is, unless the only definition that you use for "good" is how much violence, blood, and vulgarity it has. Paradoxically, those kinds of things lost part of their appeal to me once I reached adulthood.

That sounds very virtuous and normally, I would agree. But again, how you communicate something like violence onscreen makes a big difference in how the audience is being treated. And the characters. Having a few scratches and scrapes applied with makeup which only shows up after the villain's bus or car or the villain themselves explodes, when the hero is watching in the smoke / flames is not the same thing as an actual struggle. Which is how filmmakers often choose to show that a character has really been through something. It certainly makes a big difference in something like Heathers, which had Veronica laughing at the deaths of characters before she had to actually be beaten up to stop J.D. from killing the whole school. Then she has to shoot him multiple times in bloody closeups because - again - violence to them as far as we know has been an issue of spectatorship.

And that film was a comedy.

I certainly agree when it comes to sex: maybe 1 out of 100 instances of onscreen nudity actually involves an organic nude scene or a genuine moment of intimacy or vulnerability. And your Don't Look Now's are more like 1 in a thousand.

The original Robocop was a clever satire on so many things that were going on in the country at the time and that elevated it well above the normal 80's action film. The trailer for this film makes it seem like yet another incredibly serious remake without any of the qualities that made the original worthwhile.

The original Robocop was a clever satire on so many things that were going on in the country at the time and that elevated it well above the normal 80's action film. The trailer for this film makes it seem like yet another incredibly serious remake without any of the qualities that made the original worthwhile.

But again, rewatch the trailer for the original film, and you'd see that that one was never sold to the public as a satire either.

I think if they put any of that in, it would make it look more like an action comedy and I don't think that would sit well for anybody either.